


Hungry Like The Wolf

by greygerbil



Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: Alexios is Deimos (Assassin's Creed), Animal Play, Bite Marks and Bruising, Biting, Jealousy, M/M, Possessive Behavior, Rough Sex, Severely Undernegotiated D/s, Sparring
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-09
Updated: 2019-06-09
Packaged: 2020-04-23 11:03:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19149733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greygerbil/pseuds/greygerbil
Summary: Stentor and Deimos have an unexpected connection.





	Hungry Like The Wolf

**Author's Note:**

> WARNING: Not safe, probably not entirely sane, but consensual.
> 
> Deimos and Stentor both have Issues. They're working on it. A little bit.
> 
> Written for Season of Kink, prompt: Animal Play.

They are wolves both, Deimos and him.

Kassandra is strong, a worthy fighter, and Nikolaos’ teachings are refined by her considerable skill, though Stentor has long not wanted to admit any of that to himself and still will not do so to her face; but she is too good, too reasonable, too kind to be a beast. She’s her mother’s daughter. Nine years after their first meeting in Megaris, Stentor grudgingly respects her, but it’s the savage of a sibling she drags to Sparta by his knotted hair that Stentor starts to feel kinship to after they clash on the training grounds three, four times. It’s not the sort that creates brotherly bonds, though.

Stentor hides his claws until he needs them. It’s the Spartan way. They have to be ruthless and brutal and happy to kill and accept that their families want them dead rather than surrendering; but they also have to follow orders and behave well at the _syssitia_ when they sit at supper with their brothers and keep their mouth shut when they march in lockstep for eighteen hours a day in the searing summer sun. Stentor is excellent at hitting that balance for his father taught him well.

Deimos doesn’t have to those things; Deimos doesn’t have to do anything he doesn’t want to do. He picked up his sister’s occupation to support himself and his status as Nikolaos’ son allows his presence in the city, but he bends to no rules. He laughs at Stentor for standing to attention when his superiors demand it, for his polished armour, even for the way he presents himself, with his back and knees straight at all times, alert and poised. He laughs because he knows better than to believe the veneer of cultured discipline.

Every now and then, the promise behind that teasing becomes too great for Stentor to resist.

-

The forest around Stentor is thick. There’s creatures in the underbrush, the wind in the leaves, an owl calling into the night. Stentor is clad in just his leather skirt, the rest of his and Deimos’ get-up piled away in a small, half-overgrown shrine in the protection of Artemis Orthia, blood-thirsty huntress. Stentor has been lashed over her altar when he was a teenager until his back was raw, a rite of passage. He still has scars from it, but he has so many scars it barely matters. He isn’t holding weapons. They are beyond that here, or before that, in a time when people fought with fists and stones and sharp sticks.

He hears Deimos behind him, but he’s only quick enough to turn, not step aside. Deimos lunges at him and tears him down. Stentor punches him in the face. Deimos is over him, burning eyes, bright grin, split, bleeding lip that will heal in a few hours. Stentor grabs his hair and tears his head sideways. Deimos bites his side and leaves teeth marks that won’t go away in a few hours because unlike him, Stentor isn’t some strange thing released on humanity by unkind gods.

They grapple. Deimos is stronger, but he’s used to relying on that, which is a weakness. Stentor knows where to dig his fingers into joints and soft places unguarded by bones to really hurt someone, and then he knees Deimos between the legs. Deimos groans and Stentor almost manages to get free, tastes victory like blood, but Deimos grabs him again and throws him on the ground face forward. Anger tears from Stentor in a wordless roar, frustration that he’s overwhelmed, that Nikolaos’ other son is stronger – better –, and yet he’s hard against the soft moss his hips are pressed into; some unworthy part he usually strangles silent wants to lie here with one hand in the back of his neck and one between his legs, holding him still.

“This is how dogs do it, you know?” Deimos pants into his ear as he pushes the skirt out of the way. “The leader fucks the weaker males to show them their place.”

So this makes sense, in a way, Stentor thinks bitterly to himself, even as he jerks when Deimos grabs his balls and moans when he pushes two split-slick fingers into him, not to ease the way, just to humiliate him further. He should not allow this or like this. He does not let other men do this, never has. But other men can’t beat him so soundly. His pride will submit to superior force.

“Growl for me, Spartan hound,” Deimos says, wrapping his free hand around Stentor’s throat, tight like a leather strap a dog might wear. “Let me hear you.”

Stentor shows his teeth and snarls for real when Deimos removes his fingers and forces his cock into his body. With the taste of dirt in his mouth and Deimos ploughing into him, his knees scraping on roots and stone, it seems to him his humanity is stripped away thrust by thrust. Letting go of it is freeing, though, he has no need for it here. He spreads his legs and lets Deimos take him, his own cock hanging thick and heavy between his legs. He comes rutting against the patch of damp moss when Deimos bites his shoulder.

Afterwards, he stumbles back to the shrine with seed running between his legs, Deimos close behind him. Wolves howl in the distance, kindred spirits.

-

There is something to be said for tame beasts like Stentor, too. Out in the woods they might get taken down, but in town, there’s too many humans for any monster to survive. Deimos perpetually looks constrained by the walls, unhappy in crowds. He doesn’t trust other people and maybe the reason that he seems to follow Stentor around more than anyone else is that he finds something in him that understands him. Though Stentor seems so perfectly fitted for this world, there is that one part, that splinter in his soul, that struggles against all the rules he praises most times of the day, wants to hunt for itself instead of the greater good, and spreads its legs eagerly for a strong man who other Spartans look on with doubt, but whom he likes. He did not grow up wild like Deimos, but he understands the rules of wilderness.

Deimos is mostly his mercenary now. Stentor doesn’t mind it. Deimos is more like a precarious weapon only he controls than a man come to steal his glory. The soldiers seem to see him as an extension of Stentor and Deimos doesn’t mind.

“I’m not here for Sparta,” he tells Stentor quite often.

Stentor usually answers that if he turns against his home town, he’ll chase Deimos down and kill him. Deimos taunts him that he’ll fuck him with the blunt handle of his own spear if he tries and take Stentor with him as his war prize. Crass jokes come easier to men of war than the admission that they hope it never comes to that betrayal.

“But it’s not worth anything, stealing you,” Deimos murmurs, one day. “You’d need to come with me.”

When Deimos gets nervous and annoyed, when the bottomless pit of darkness in his soul that the Cult left him with makes town and camp too difficult, he’ll gravitate towards Stentor’s side even more often. At first, Stentor is unsure what to do, though he wants to do something for him. At one point, he raises a hand into his hair, scratches the back of his neck. Simple touches. Deimos leans into his palm, so Stentor remembers to do it whenever it seems to him like Deimos will flee into the woods or kill somebody soon. It works out well enough. Deimos grows calmer under his hand.

-

Deimos doesn’t like Spartan soldiers, but he mostly just doesn’t care about them; the enemies Stentor points him at interest him more. This is true until Stentor meets Theron one evening, an old friend from the _agoge_ recently stuck in a year-long battle in Arcadia and just now returned to Sparta. Theron is a handsy man with a broad smile and good humour who coaxes Stentor to drink more wine than he usually would and stay late into the night at his place, exchanging stories, before Stentor wanders home dazed and smiling.

Home is mercifully empty, his family out on errands of their own. He falls into bed. When he sees something emerge from the shadows, he scrambles for his dagger, but it drops from his hand when in the twilight he recognises Deimos, scowling, tense, but just Deimos, whom he doesn’t fear.

He crawls over Stentor on all fours.

“You’re drunk,” he mutters.

“It happens.”

Deimos kisses his neck, but it’s not gentle; he knocks his skull against Stentor’s jaw. Stentor brings his fist down hard on Deimos’ back.

“I saw you,” Deimos says.

“Did you follow me?”

“Who is that man?”

“Theron. What does it matter to you?”

“Do you also bend over for Theron like a bitch in heat, like you do for me? He was all over you.”

Stentor can feel Deimos’ chest rising and falling against his own when he lowers himself down on him.

“You idiot. Since you watched, you should know. Did you see us fuck? He’s an old friend. Besides, who knows who you lay with when you leave Sparta?”

He wonders why Deimos even followed him, how he didn’t notice him at all. Neither disturbs him as much as it should.

“No one,” Deimos says against his skin. He slips backwards, scowling, forcing his legs apart, but Stentor just looks at him through half-lidded eyes, unimpressed, realising in one moment there’s no need to be concerned. Deimos knows he can’t keep Stentor just by putting his cock between his legs; can’t keep him the way he wants him if Stentor says ‘no’ because what he wants is for Stentor to say ‘yes’, to not be afraid, and to prefer his insanity over a good Spartan man like Theron. And now he also knows Deimos doesn’t want anyone else.

Stentor’s throat feels tight.

“Come here,” he says, gesturing to his neck.

Deimos looks wary.

“Come here, cub,” Stentor repeats and grins.

Deimos bites the flesh of his thigh, but after that he moves up.

“It’s just you,” Stentor says, looking Deimos in the eyes, but words are weak. “Here. Don’t leave a bruise down there, leave it where others will see.”

They won’t know who left it because Stentor will not tell, but they’ll see he is taken.

After looking at him, a wolf before bloodied prey, Deimos kisses and mouths at his neck, then worries at it with blunt teeth. Stentor grunts as he bites down harder than needed, leaves him marked. He’s hard against Deimos’ belly now, noses against his shoulder, wordless, animalistic. Deimos grabs on to him.

Moments later, he’s on his knees for Deimos, still without words, giving himself to the inner beast. It frightens him for the very first time. His wine-addled brain realises too late he’s in Sparta, he’s in his father’s house, he can’t pretend here that he’s some animal in the woods with all the evidence of his human life piled around him; and yet he acts like one and wants it, wants Deimos to make him forget about polemarch Stentor for a little bit and leave just the wolf, even when he’s staring directly at his golden breastplate leaning against the wall.

When they’re done, he’s shivering and sober.

Deimos’ weight falls against his back.

Usually, Deimos will back away when they’re done. He’ll be there to mock, to quarrel, and to hover until Stentor is dressed again and shoos him off, but he does not keep touching him. Stentor wonders what this is, but he knows when Deimos strokes his shoulder with his thumb and presses his face down into the crook of his neck, onto the bruise, an aching reminder to stay in the moment. It’s comfort.

Whether Deimos really knows why Stentor needs it or not, whether Stentor does, or if Stentor will ever tell Deimos, Stentor can’t say. But Deimos doesn’t need everything explained, pulled apart into its details. He understands Stentor.

Stentor relaxes slowly as Deimos pulls out of him and then settles properly against his back, warm and heavy.

“You think too much, Spartan,” Deimos says quietly.

-

Stentor is ordered back to Megaris to drive the Athenians out – again. Kassandra needs Deimos to come with her to shut down a man of the Cult in Melos. The evening before they part, Deimos sits on Stentor’s bed, watching him pack his bag.

“The bruises will all be gone when I return.”

Stentor has bite marks in visible spots now, which come in varying shades of green, purple, blue. He likes them, though he’s sure Deimos likes them even more.

“So you had better come back to me quickly,” Stentor says, aware that he is leading four hundred men into eight hundred, that Kassandra and Deimos set out to fight a man who has been ruling in Greece for longer than any of them have been alive.

Aware that they might not meet again.

Deimos must know, too. Of course, he doubts either of them expects to die a natural death, anyway. But to expire there in Megaris, on the prowl without his closest companion, or to know Deimos will bleed out with miles of sea and land between them, where Stentor can’t even avenge him, suddenly seems intolerable to Stentor.

“I’ll be there soon,” Deimos says defiantly.

As he passes him by, Stentor slows and reaches down and grabs the back of Deimos’ head, pulling his forehead against his hip. Deimos growls, but he hugs him tightly around the middle and won’t let go for a long while as Stentor pets his hair.

Good Spartan men bore Stentor, anyway.


End file.
